The Social Evolution of Humans: The Evolution of Consciousness, part 8

Atlantide Phototravel / Corbis

Facilitated by language and the campfire, humans became increasingly social animals.[i] People banded together into ever larger, more complex social, political, and economical groupings—from bands to tribes, chiefdoms, and states.[ii] As Francis Fukuyama noted, “Even if we scrupulously avoid value judgments about later civilizations being “higher” than earlier ones, they clearly become more complex, richer, and more powerful. Those that succeed in adapting usually win out over ones that don’t, just as individual organisms do.”[iii] Recent scholarship even demonstrates that societies invariably evolve step-wise through these lifestyles, each incorporating the previous and transcending it, emerging into a society that is more complex and historically unprecedented.[iv] 

Hong Kong Image: https://iso.500px.com/cityscape-night-photography-tips/

Each societal transition also emerged faster than the previous. Our shift from arboreal fruit-eating creatures to bipedal scavengers took millions of years. Then, about 2.5 million years ago, marking the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic era, Homo habilis used the first stone tools, probably to cleave the meat from carcasses and to crack bones for the nutrient-dense marrow that had been left by huge scary predators.[v] By about 300,000 years ago, during the Middle Paleolithic era, our ancestors were becoming hunters. We were becoming more dangerous, more numerous, and behaviorally more sophisticated. During the Great Leap Forward some fifty to seventy thousand years ago, humans created a wide variety of sophisticated tools, engaged in art, and added fishing to their lives.[vi] Some twelve thousand years ago there emerged the first settlements and then gardening, horticulture, and agriculture. Once rooted to the land, expanding populations all over the world farmed the arable portions ever more intensively and in larger scale.  Five hundred years ago, European capitalism and colonization and all their attendant wealth and poverty spread like kudzu over the face of the earth. The industrial revolution began about 250 years ago. The next transition to a post-industrial service economy took but one century. The pace of cultural and societal change, of innovation, lifestyle, fashion, and worldview is still accelerating. The next development may well emerge within the span of a generation.[vii] In the face of collapse, it may have to.

image: https://ynnej1976.wordpress.com/tag/habana/

Note that thus far no lifestyle has been completely abandoned. All of them exist simultaneously, from the hunter-gatherers in the Amazon and Kalahari Desert to the hyper-cyborgs in Tokyo and Manhattan. This may prove advantageous in times of crisis, as we collect all their lessons to develop the full human repertoire of possibilities.

About this history there is little disagreement, for, like fossils in the rock, a society’s exteriors leave behind evidence of their existence in the form of archaeological remains, historical buildings, altered landscapes, and the written record. There are also the living representatives of each way of life, from the primitive foragers in the Earth’s most remote regions to the small future experiments being tried about the globe.[viii]

ENDNOTES

[i] Tattersall and Schwartz (2001), Burton (2009), Wrangham (2009). 

Tattersall, I., and Schwartz, J. (2001) Extinct Humans. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.

Burton, F.D. (2009) Fire: The Spark that Ignited Human Evolution, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Wrangham, R. (2009) Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Basic Books, New York.

[ii] Johnson and Earle (2000), Fukuyama (2011:53).  And, according to Science, each civilization appears to go through stages in a predictable succession.

Johnson, A.W., and Earle T. (2000) The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State. Stanford Univ. Press, California.

Fukuyama, F. (2011) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

[iii] Fukuyama (2011:51).

[iv] Currie et al. (2010), Diamond (2010).

Currie, T.E., Greenhill, S.J., Gray, R.D., Hasegawa, T., and Mace, R. (2010) Rise and Fall of Political Complexity in Island South-East Asia and the Pacific. Nature, v. 467, pp. 801-804.

Diamond, J. (2010) Political Evolution. Nature, v. 467, pp. 798-799.

[v] Tattersall and Schwartz (2001). The archaeological record is not complete enough to determine for certain that it was this one species called Homo hablis that first used tools so regularly and adeptly, however the evidence clearly shows that stones tools were being used by a hominid at the time. 

[vi] This suggests that these cultural activities had precedents earlier, perhaps many of tens of thousands of years earlier.

[vii] Although this endnote will make more sense in the following post, it must be noted that Gebser (1949:42) argues that the structures of consciousness are still present in each one us of, individually.

[viii] Weisman (1998), Carson (2010), FIC (2013).

Weisman, A. (1998) Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, VT.

Carson, K. (2010) The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Booksurge.

FIC (Fellowship for Intentional Communities) (2013) Intentional Communities.